Carney is a contributing editor at Wired and has written for Mother Jones, Foreign Policy, Discover, Outside and Fast Company. He has also appeared on radio and television, including NPR and National Geographic TV.

Carney has worked in some of the most dangerous and unlikely corners of the world. In 2010, he won the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism for the story "Meet the Parents," which tracked an international kidnapping-to-adoption ring. His first book, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers, was published by William Morrow in 2011.

Carney has traveled to India while he was a student at Kenyon College in 1998, during which he learned to speak Hindi. He has spent more than half a decade in South Asia.